Professional procrastination

Dear reader, I'm here to confess my sins. I haven't been a good student this week and now I'm going to write the little bits and pieces I have gathered this week.

Me from Monday to Saturday and most of Sunday too

On Monday we had two lectures. Anna Ikonen talked about Social media marketing. She showed us some commercials and the one I remember is the Coca Cola advert she showed us. It was unorthodox since it contained so much laughter but one metric of a good commercial is that the viewer remembers the commercial even days later right? One of my favourite commercials I remember seeing many years ago is also something not so ordinary but it is fun and creative.

The second lecture of the day we had Anu Nousiainen talking about future. She is a futurist. Interesting title and her job is to foresee and research possible trends of the future. She told us that services are never ready. There is always something that can be done better or even new innovations that can help services to become better. People's latent needs reveal new business opportunities. There are services that people talk about and we have companies that fill customers' needs. But customers also have dreams and desires that aren't commonly thought about and that could open new business opportunities. The challenge is to find out what they are and if it's possible to make a sustainable business out of those. I have to say that the lecture was the most demanding and academic that we've had so far on this course. But pretty much the message was that as marketers we need to understand people's everyday life and value creation. For example everyone hates standing in line in a grocery store waiting for their turn. Many might think that self-service counters are the next thing to come to help this but amazon took the idea even further to make shopping even easier for customers. Check it out.

On Thursday we had Anh Nguyen talking about inbound marketing I believe? I had difficulties understanding what she was trying to lecture about but I managed to make a few notes about finding a job through unusual channels. She said that it is possible to find a job by looking through thesis cases. The idea is to find a company that has had a problem and then you email them offering your help and that you might have a solution to their problem. First you do a thesis case for the company to impress them and then afterwards they might even hire you. The other methods she mentioned how to find a job are spending time on linkedin and blogging there or attending networking events. That's all I got from that lecture, and I checked what wikipedia said about inbound marketing to make sure I understand the concept. It's like I thought it would be. But that's my week in a nutshell since we didn't progress too much on our group work. I have many ideas about the task we are still doing for SSM but time will tell if anything concrete comes out of them. I have to say that I'm surprised how much text I was able to produce since I didn't have too many thoughts about what to write to this blog post 30 minutes ago. But yeah, thanks for stopping by.